Amazon Web Services and Salesforce deepen relationship through new IoT and Alexa links

Cloud leader Amazon Web Services and CRM giant Salesforce will expand their strategic alliance — delivering five new service integrations and making Salesforce offerings available through AWS in Canada as part of Salesforce’s international public-cloud infrastructure expansion, the companies said this morning.

The new offerings build on a high-profile cloud partnership announced by the companies earlier this year. Salesforce also partners with AWS rival Microsoft Azure, but the San Francisco-based tech giant has increasingly found itself at odds with Microsoft over issues including the Redmond company’s $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn.

One of the new integrations connects Salesforce’s Internet of Things Cloud with AWS’s IoT service, to let businesses create Salesforce apps dealing with real-time activity on connected devices. This integration is in preview, with full release scheduled for next year.

Another new integration, the Alexa Toolkit for Salesforce, is a collection of technical resources from both Amazon and Salesforce that will let developers build voice-enabled experiences. Developers will be able to learn how to build Alexa Skills for Salesforce through Trailhead, Salesforce’s education operation. The toolkit and training will be available in the first half of 2017.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy

The other three integrations involve:

Making the new Amazon AppStream 2.0 available in the Salesforce AppExchange as a Lightning component in the first half of 2017. This will let customers integrate streaming applications from the AWS cloud directly within Salesforce. AppStream is a managed application-streaming service that lets customers stream desktop applications from AWS to any device running a web browser, without rewriting them. The integration will be available in the first half of 2017.

Building a new connector between AWS’s Redshift data-warehouse service and Salesforce Wave Analytics, a suite of apps for sales, service, marketing and IT. The connection is meant to let Salesforce customers easily analyze large datasets without investing the time and resources required to administer a self-managed on-premises data warehouse. The connector will be available in the first half of 2017.

Allowing secure, private network connections between Salesforce Heroku applications and AWS virtual private clouds. Customers of both Heroku and AWS “have long wanted to enable their Heroku apps and their resources running in AWS VPCs to work together without using a public network connection,” the two companies said. With the addition of Amazon VPC Peering for Salesforce Heroku Private Spaces, they will be able to do so. This offering is now in beta and is expected to be generally available in the first half of next year.

Salesforce’s use of AWS in Canada for core services, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud and Analytics Cloud, will be generally available in mid-2017. Other, similar expansions elsewhere will follow, the companies said.

AWS and Salesforce solidified their relationship in May, announcing that the San Francisco-based tech company had chosen AWS as its “preferred public cloud infrastructure provider.” Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said then that “there is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities forsupporting the needs of our growing global customer base.” Salesforce also maintains its own data centers.

[Editor’s Note: Salesforce is a GeekWire sponsor.]

Dan Richman covers cloud technology, developer tools and enterprise software for GeekWire. He has been covering the news for more than 25 years, including a decade at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and writing for MSNBC and private newsletters. Reach him at drichman@geekwire.com and follow him @danielarichman.